Scott's WeblogThe weblog of an IT pro focusing on cloud computing, Kubernetes, Linux, containers, and networking

Technology Short Take 94

Welcome to Technology Short Take 94! Ready for another round of links, articles, and thoughts on data center technologies? (Who knows, maybe I’ll throw a rant or two in there.) OK, enough rambling…here’s the good stuff!

Networking

Amit Aneja has a two-part series (so far) explaining the routing architecture in NSX-T (which brings multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud support to the NSX platform). This is some good content and reminds me of the the old NVP/NSX content I generated back in the day. Ah, good times…anyway, check out Amit’s stuff here and here.

Sam McGeown has a nice diagram of the communications channels between the various VMware NSX components.

Matt Oswalt tackles the idea of “intent-driven” or “intent-based” networking—all the rage right now—and outlines how something like this must interact with domains outside of networking in order to be effective. I particularly liked his (mini-)rant about how network automation can’t be only about making the network engineer’s life easier. Oh, snap!

I’m not really sure if this belongs in networking or not (how does one classify OS kernel-level work on networking and security?), but we’ll stick it here anyway: check out this blog post on cilium-health, a tool for troubleshooting cluster connectivity.

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around (sorry!). I’ll stay alert for content that I might be able to include in the next Tech Short Take.

Security

If you’re using CloudFormation to manage your AWS security groups in an infrastructure-as-code approach, you owe it to yourself to check out this article by Jose Luis Ordiales.

Security is a many-faceted area, and one facet is appropriately protecting credentials. This article by Sjors Robroek shows one approach to appropriately protecting credentials when using automation tools.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

I guess we can talk automation in this section, right? Yasen Simeonov talks about the work that went into the NSX-T APIs (JSON-based, hooray!) and how to use the Python SDK for NSX-T. The content is a bit high-level, but given the medium (a blog post) it’s hard to get super-deep. It serves as a decent introduction, at least.

In the last Tech Short Take, I shared an article by Kynan Riley on node affinity. This time around, he’s talking about pod affinity.

I’m a 1Password user (just wish they’d release a “real” Linux client and bring back support for local vaults to all platforms), so seeing this article on how Agile Bits (the company behind 1Password) is using Terraform with AWS was pretty cool.

Operating Systems/Applications

Over the last couple of weeks I came across two articles related to creating Docker images. The first comes from Shubham Sharma, which provides some tips on writing a Dockerfile. The second comes from Matthew Setter, who shares five ways to slim your Docker images. Both articles contain good, albeit somewhat basic, information. Folks who are newer to building Docker images should find these articles useful.

Career/Soft Skills

OK, so this isn’t really a “soft skill” per se, but it may prove useful nevertheless (and it didn’t fit anywhere else). Nick Janetakis writes about accessing documentation directly from your code editor using either Dash (macOS) or Zeal (open source, multiple platforms). I’ve been a Dash user for a while and I can attest to how handy it can be.

And that’s another Tech Short Take in the bag. I hope you found something useful here! As always, feel free to hit me up on Twitter if you have any feedback (or even if you just want to chat).